When race cars whiz around a track at 200 miles per hour, driving ability isn’t the only factor that determines who wins the race. Behind the scenes, in mobile data centers tucked into semis and behind laptops in the pit area, people like Chuck Houghton use tech to make decisions that can determine whether their car crosses the finish line first.

As race engineer for the No. 4 Corvette C6.R of the American Le Mans Series GT class, Houghton and his squad build sophisticated algorithms to crunch the reams of data spit out by modern race cars. When it’s race time, Houghton is on scene, running calculations that determine when to make changes to car variables like "ride height" or when to let drivers know that they're running a few seconds behind. “It’s kind of like hanging a carrot out there in front of a horse,” Houghton says.

In some cases, it’s as simple as making sure the car doesn't run out of gas. At the Petit Le Mans in Georgia 2010, a 10-hour race, the endgame came down to putting just the right amount of fuel into the car.

“[Both top cars had] stopped at the same time for our last stop," Houghton recalls. "We put just a tiny bit more fuel in our car, so they beat us out of the pit. And on the last lap, the Ferrari ended up running out of fuel. We were in second, and passed them on the track, and won.”

Whether the algorithms built by the Ferrari’s squad weren’t good enough, the calculations were lacking, or someone just took a chance and made a mistake, the end result was the same: second place. Houghton firmly believes that the in-house software his group created helped win that race and today provides an ongoing competitive advantage over other teams.

Houghton spoke with us just a few days after his car finished first in its class at the Tequila Patron American Le Mans Series at Long Beach. The car completed 84 laps in just an hour and 20 minutes, a walk in the park compared to some of the endurance races the #4 Corvette squad does each year. Longest of all is the historic 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. Between travel and preparation, Houghton and colleagues stay awake for a good 36 hours by the time the race is completed.

Chuck Houghton on race day

“The adrenaline is enough to keep you up for most of it, especially if you’re doing well,” Houghton says. “If you’re in the top three or four you’re generally excited enough that you can stay awake without too much coffee or Red Bull. But certainly when you're kind of out of it, and you have no shot at winning, and you’re multiple laps down, it makes it really difficult to stay awake.”

In such long races, analysis and adjustments take on a bigger role. “During the race we get live telemetry from the car,” Houghton says. “We can see exactly what the tire pressures are, the temperature of the tires, what gear the driver is in, we can see all that in real time and we can adjust quick things like tire pressure for the next stop.” While the team keeps pit stop times to a minimum during short races, in longer ones Houghton might take more time to adjust things like the overall balance of the car by changing the “rake,” the difference in ride height between the front and rear.

Houghton, who has been with the Corvette squad just outside Detroit for about eight years, earned a degree in mechanical engineering while taking an interest in car racing, getting involved in a Society of Automotive Engineers student competition to build a small race car. His expertise is more on the vehicle engineering side, but over time he’s learned how to program in Visual Basic and MATLAB to help build the tools necessary to properly analyze the cars.

In the week before a race, Houghton and fellow engineers run hundreds of simulated laps through their computer programs to evaluate vehicle dynamics and to determine what changes to make to the car. They bring a cluster of servers to the track in a semi-truck for pre-race preparations; during the race, they settle in front of their laptops with big headphones and ear plugs in place to drown out the noise. They talk to each other via an instant messaging system they built in-house, and to the driver by voice.

While Houghton plays a crucial role on the team, he hasn’t yet been rewarded with the chance to drive the #4 Corvette. “We've got guys that are professional and probably do a lot better job than I could at that,” he says.

Houghton is one of many tech experts making a living in the world of professional sports, which increasingly relies on IT work. Just ask Red Sox IT Director Steve Conley, who has overseen a complete tech makeover of Fenway Park.

An ancient shrine enters the wireless age

Eleven years ago, Conley ran IT for a consulting company, trying to ride the dotcom boom. His company was growing—until the economy went south, and Conley became “essentially the grim reaper,” going into downsized offices to strip out equipment. “If you saw me coming into an office, you’d know it was not going well,” he said.

So it was a relief when he took a job leading IT for the Boston Red Sox. The team was up for sale, and both the organization and Fenway Park were badly in need of technology updates. “I went in with a ‘what the heck’ attitude, and it’ll look good on my resume, and it’ll be a lot of fun,” Conley said. “Lo and behold, 11 years later, I’m still plugging away.”

The team has since undergone a complete technical transformation. Back in 2001, the infrastructure was simply “haphazard," Conley says. "We barely had e-mail. It was just a different culture and a different time."

Fenway, which turned 100 this year, began a decade-long renovation after a new ownership group took over in 2002, a renovation that was both difficult and exciting for the IT staff. Conley speaks of “data closets” rather than data centers, each one stuck in a different spot, with seemingly constant movement dictated by the needs of building construction.

“To get from point A to point C, the connection between either A and B or A and C was cut four different times in the eight years of renovation,” Conley says. Through hard work, the finished product came together. “It’s a modern building underneath its bones,” Conley adds proudly. “We have ways to get any technology we need. We have fiber throughout the building, where prior to that you would have this cascade of cable going back to the 1940s hanging off the side. It was ugly.”

Red Sox IT Director Steve Conley

During this time, Conley’s IT group also played a pivotal role in modernizing the Red Sox system for delivering game footage to players—which was sorely needed.

On October 17, 2004, a few innings before pinch runner Dave Roberts snatched the most celebrated stolen base in Red Sox history, he went to Conley’s video crew and asked to watch footage of Yankees closer Mariano Rivera pitching with a man on first.

Little did Red Sox fans know, the fate of their season relied in part on one of the most beat up, unreliable video systems in professional sports. Literally falling apart, the system crashed numerous times during playoff games.

The Sox had been lugging a server and small storage array around the country the entire 162-game season, a level of travel it was not designed to withstand. “The backplane of the storage array had started to come away from the back,” Conley said. “All of that movement had caused it to really loosen up. It was one of those things you just cross your fingers and hope it was going to work.”

That day, it worked.

Roberts “was playing it over and over again, trying to get his timing down,” Conley says. “He said the system helped him mentally get ready because he knew he was going to have to be called on to steal that base. And he stole that base and things began to change.”

If you're a Sox fan, you know that Roberts stole the base and tied the game, sparking the first comeback from a 3-0 series deficit in Major League Baseball history. The series win sent Boston to the World Series, where more technical problems awaited.

The video system crashed in the seventh inning of game one of the World Series, according to Conley. It proceeded to crash again in each game, but the video squad got it working again each time as the Red Sox swept the Cardinals.

Of course, it played just one small part in the team’s success, but the story illustrates the sometimes frantic life of tech professionals in major league sports. The video system was replaced the next year by a more robust EMC Storage Area Network (SAN), but even that ran into trouble when it fell 14 feet from a plane to the tarmac during a road trip. The CPU popped out of its socket. EMC sent engineers to Camden Yards in Baltimore, and Conley talked his video guy through the CPU replacement by phone and “we had it working the next day,” he says. Nowadays, the Sox travel with 20 to 30 terabytes of video for players to watch on laptops.

Back at Fenway, Conley and crew are working on a wireless access system for fans. Last season, they arranged for Verizon to install a vendor-neutral distributed antenna system (DAS) to improve cell service for fans. Placing 365 antennas throughout a facility with special building restrictions (thanks to its historic status) has its challenges, but the project got done. This season, Conley worked with Comcast to install a new fiber connection that can serve 100Mbps connections for employees, while WiFi has been extended to fans with 120 access points that handle about 2,000 connections per game.

Conley says he’d love to connect up to 38,000 people to WiFi, despite Fenway being about the size of a city block. At at this point his dream is running up “against the laws of physics," but he still hopes it will happen within a few years.

Conley grew up in Massachusetts, and his freshman grade point average at Northeastern University suffered from watching too much baseball as the Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series in heartbreaking fashion. Being a team employee, he now has two World Series championship rings he plans to hand down to his daughters.

Along the way, he got to skate with his family on a temporary ice sheet placed on the field before the 2010 “Frozen Fenway” matchup featuring the NHL’s Boston Bruins, and he got a semi-private Bruce Springsteen concert when The Boss did a sound check before playing Fenway in 2003. Conley cherishes the memories, even more so because he helped play a role in preserving Fenway, a park that was once slated to be replaced.

"It's amazing, the history in the building," he said. "You get conditioned to it but every once in a while it will dawn on you. If I have a spare half hour for lunch and it's a beautiful day, I just go and sit in the stands and eat my sandwich when the park is empty. I just take a moment and go 'oh wow, this is cool.'"

You forgot the best part of working in stadiums - the huge jumbotrons. My friend works at Heinz Field, and he says nothing compares with lugging the 100+ 10lb. jumbotron cells up the tower, especially since they break so often.

It is ridiculous how much of the tech fails very frequently. If those guys weren't there to hold its hand, I think most stadiums would fall over and die on game day.

It is ridiculous how much of the tech fails very frequently. If those guys weren't there to hold its hand, I think most stadiums would fall over and die on game day.

I think this is true of most technology, though. Think of a modern data center: packed full of tons of redundant rack or blade servers so there's a constant balance between what's in failure and what's humming along fine. Imagine if the mechanical objects we rely on (your car, your washing machine, your doorknob, etc.) were as failure-prone as most technology. Whole cities would tumble to the ground.

I'm in the end stages of writing an android app to permit grassroots endurance racing teams (think ChumpCar, like the ars article from a year ago) to get some of the telemetry benefits described in this article. It does transmission of arbitrary car parameters to a pitside laptop. My first time using it on-track will be in 3 days, I'm super-excited, and this article only heightened the excitement. I want to be like a cheap version of a Le Mans team

Why is ride height in parentheses in the first paragraph? Its not like its not a real thing or a euphemism for something else.

Also, they can change ride height mid-race?

*Formula 1 junkie right here.

Different series have different rules for what can be changed during a race. I think in Formula 1 you can change the brake bias from in the cockpit. During a pit stop you can change the angle of the front wing, you usually only see this done when there is rain involved.

In NASCAR, they can change the brake bias in the car. During a pit stop they can change the wedge, which shifts the weight from the right-front and left-rear tires to the other tires. They can also change the track bar, which moves the rear differential sideways and changes the rear roll center. A more desperate change is to put a spring rubber in, which effectively shortens the spring to make it stiffer.

And in all series they can adjust the tire pressure for subtle changes.

Great piece, especially the part about Fenway and Dave Roberts using the archaic video system to scout Rivera. As a Red Sox fan, I'm honestly shocked the system didn't crash and cause Roberts to get thrown out.

Why is ride height in parentheses in the first paragraph? Its not like its not a real thing or a euphemism for something else.

Also, they can change ride height mid-race?

*Formula 1 junkie right here.

I believe they can, don't think there is any rule against it, but I seriously doubt it's worth the trouble. At Petit or Le Mans they could get away with it due to the length of the race, but that kind of setup change is very involved and would only fix a serious setup screwup. Usually the ride height is set first, then shock/spring settings after that and only if there is excessive bottoming do they change the ride height. Teams that advanced also have a baseline setup planned weeks in advance of a race so they work on mainly shocks and tire pressures to dial in the cars.

Also, that 2010 win at Petit for Corvette was amazing. They didn't even realize what happened until after they crossed the line if I remember right. Poor Ferrari didn't even show up for the podium ceremony they were so devastated. They were literally 1/4 of a mile from winning another endurance event and the championship. Such a heartbreaker and Corvette got to save face by not going an entire season without at least one win. I HIGHLY encourage anyone within 75 miles of Atlanta to go and see the Petit Le Mans. You'll love it and if you don't I promise to refund your money. The first time the Audi goes hauling ass past you and you hear nothing but wind noise over the car you'll get a shit eating grin guaranteed.

Great piece, especially the part about Fenway and Dave Roberts using the archaic video system to scout Rivera. As a Red Sox fan, I'm honestly shocked the system didn't crash and cause Roberts to get thrown out.

Heh heh. I'm a lifelong Sox fan. I was so depressed about being down 3-0 I literally didn't watch Game 4. I soothed myself by watching Patriots Super Bowl DVDs instead. I actually sort of hoped the Sox would lose just to get the series over with. BUT I had tickets for Game 5 and stood through six hours of baseball at Fenway the very next day. After 14 innings, and about 15 nervous breakdowns, I had one of the greatest moments of my life when Big Papi hit the game-winning single. There are only so many moments you get as a sports fan that are just chilling and stay with you forever, and that was one of the best.

nothing wrong with them, just that i worked for them last year and so it's funny to see someone wearing a compuware shirt! (I worked for their gomez.com website performance mgmt group).

i also remember kidding around with other IT workers at my company when i saw that the redsox were looking for an IT person. at the time manny ramirez had a pretty damn huge paycheck, and we were wondering whether or not he got paid via ADP just like us poor slobs. the idea that manny had (and if you remember him this is pretty likely) forgotten his Exchange password and gotten locked out of his account seemed pretty funny at the time.

nothing wrong with them, just that i worked for them last year and so it's funny to see someone wearing a compuware shirt! (I worked for their gomez.com website performance mgmt group).

i also remember kidding around with other IT workers at my company when i saw that the redsox were looking for an IT person. at the time manny ramirez had a pretty damn huge paycheck, and we were wondering whether or not he got paid via ADP just like us poor slobs. the idea that manny had (and if you remember him this is pretty likely) forgotten his Exchange password and gotten locked out of his account seemed pretty funny at the time.

Manny Ramirez Asks Red Sox If He Can Work From HomeMAY 3, 2007 | ISSUE 43•52 ISSUE 43•18BOSTON—Claiming that a relaxed atmosphere and a chance to create his own schedule would greatly benefit his productivity, Red Sox left-fielder Manny Ramirez has asked team officials if he can play the remainder of the season from the comfort of his own home. "My client just can't seem to focus in his current place of work," said Ramirez's agent Greg Genske, noting that Fenway Park's loud, boisterous atmosphere and high-stress, pressure-packed environment are "not ideal working conditions for anyone." "Manny seeks a work space where he doesn't have to constantly travel, can wear whatever he wants, and can work at his own pace. I assure you that he will be able to put up the same statistics he normally does while physically on a baseball diamond. Just give him until November or December." The Red Sox have tentatively agreed to allow Ramirez to telecommute, claiming that although their offense may suffer without him at the ballpark, their defense in a vacant left field may substantially improve.

I'm in the end stages of writing an android app to permit grassroots endurance racing teams (think ChumpCar, like the ars article from a year ago) to get some of the telemetry benefits described in this article. It does transmission of arbitrary car parameters to a pitside laptop. My first time using it on-track will be in 3 days, I'm super-excited, and this article only heightened the excitement. I want to be like a cheap version of a Le Mans team

I hope you always enjoy it. My couple of races spent in the pits with http://www.v8supercars.com.au/ was very challenging, it was also a telemetry exercise around driver health monitoring. Great people but it was incredibly loud, hot and tiring. Maybe the hardest bit is that as a non-team member in the pit area you don't have a spot to be in so you dodge busy people constantly

I'd love to hear a little more about your homemade telemetry setup. I've tried sending DTA data over a wireless RS-232 connection and looked into capturing AiM/MoTeC data via wireless USB (for the older dashes, newer are on Ethernet) but haven't got any working the way I want.

PM or email me if you can (AS won't let me because I haven't "participated enough").

Probably because I hadn't heard the term before. I am a basketball and hockey junkie but I found the racing story fascinating.

You should check out the V8 Supercars series in Australia. It's one of the best in the world for that kind of action.

I remember a recent race, where the leader ran out of fuel so close to the line he still made 2nd place, but lost 1st place, and they have strict tyre regulations that change from one race track to another and really mix things up. Like forcing all teams to use two different tyres at some point in the race, each with completely different characteristics, and engineers start talking about "it rained yesterday and so the track is completely clean... but half way through the race it will be a bit dirty with used rubber on it again, so we think it's better to run X compound at the latter parts of the race because it's more suited to those conditions".

Nothing gets me on the edge of my seat like a driver I don't like having a 10 second lead with 5 laps to go, but his tyres are so rubbish my favourite is gaining 3 seconds each lap, and desperately tries to overtake just a couple of seconds before the finish line. Decades of careful rule changes make that a regular occurrence in V8SC.

And there's quite a few crashes, which adds a big element of chance to the engineering tactics. You might go for soft sticky tyres and get half a lap lead on your competitor... then a crash brings him hard up on your tail and your soft tyres are used up... but he hasn't used his yet.

Sometimes they do three sets of qualifying and three races on a single track in one weekend. Sometimes they just do a single 12 hour race.

One of the coolest things I ever got to do was go to Monza while I was in Milan for my job. We made a special trip to see the time trials unfortunately I flew out on race day, but even the time trials and minor races were awesome. And one of the coolest parts was the sound difference between the corvettes and pretty much every other car.

It's Le Mans, you can change the whole gearbox mid-race if you want! Audi used to do this pretty regularly on their R8s with a "quick change" rear end (gearbox, rear suspension and bodywork all in one unit).

drinking12many wrote:

And one of the coolest parts was the sound difference between the corvettes and pretty much every other car.

A few years ago I went to Silverstone for the Le Mans Series 1000km/six hour race. The Aston Martin DBR9 V12s and, to an even greater extent the Gulf Lola Astons (same engine, mid-mounted rather than the front-engined DBR9), were pretty much the most amazing and musical things I've ever heard. I could've listened to those things all day (and basically did).Random YouTube exampleI'm sad to see them disappearing from most endurance series, but at least there's still a fairly wide variety of powerplants and sounds in Le Mans-affiliated racing.

I'm in the end stages of writing an android app to permit grassroots endurance racing teams (think ChumpCar, like the ars article from a year ago) to get some of the telemetry benefits described in this article. It does transmission of arbitrary car parameters to a pitside laptop. My first time using it on-track will be in 3 days, I'm super-excited, and this article only heightened the excitement. I want to be like a cheap version of a Le Mans team

As the author of last year's Chumpcar article, I'd be really interested in learning more about that app! Which region are you racing in? We'll be on track again at the end of June at Brainerd in MN, taking on the might of the E36s and E30s in our GTI.

Why is ride height in parentheses in the first paragraph? Its not like its not a real thing or a euphemism for something else.

Also, they can change ride height mid-race?

*Formula 1 junkie right here.

Different series have different rules for what can be changed during a race. I think in Formula 1 you can change the brake bias from in the cockpit. During a pit stop you can change the angle of the front wing, you usually only see this done when there is rain involved.

In NASCAR, they can change the brake bias in the car. During a pit stop they can change the wedge, which shifts the weight from the right-front and left-rear tires to the other tires. They can also change the track bar, which moves the rear differential sideways and changes the rear roll center. A more desperate change is to put a spring rubber in, which effectively shortens the spring to make it stiffer.

And in all series they can adjust the tire pressure for subtle changes.

It is allowed in F1, parc fermé conditions come into effect after your part of qualifying is complete and are lifted at the start of the race. It's just not viable unless the race is stopped.

Brawn/Mercedes famously made wholesale setup changes in Korea in 2010 when the race was stopped there for rain and several teams followed suit in Monaco when that race was stopped the season after. McLaren for example were able to fix Hamilton's rear wing in time for the restart.

It's really too bad ipads are being used for anything. A new stadium with technology like this should be designing software for the viewers, players and workers from a modular approach rather than a proprietary one. What I mean is they should be focusing on device-agnostic software, not proprietary ios or ANY platform app for that reason. I hope eventually we get to a point where we can have really capable web apps so it doesn't matter what device you use. Forcing one type of hardware onto anyone isn't good for anyone or scalability.

Being a team employee, he now has two World Series championship rings he plans to hand down to his daughters.

Sometimes I wish I at least applied for that IT position with the Saints back in 2006...

In the mid-90's, before I got into the IT field, I was working as an electrician. The company I worked for had the contract with BellSouth Mobility (along with Spring and Primeco) to do all their cell towers, MTSO's and such. I knew the Super Dome job was coming (putting in mini-cell stations), and was lucky enough to be on the crew for them. We didn't do any of the work during games, but we did get to spend the first 4 home games of the '96 season in the dome to babysit the new system. We sucked that year (Mora's last season), but it was still cool having that kind of access during the games.